There are no elections in Wisconsin in which non-citizens are permitted to vote.
Persons registering to vote in Wisconsin must certify that they are citizens and acknowledge that they may be prosecuted for providing false information. Despite those prohibitions, politicians in Wisconsin have been raising the specter that non-citizens could be voting in large numbers in the state and urging that steps must be taken to prevent it.
The claim that non-citizens are illegally voting in elections in Wisconsin or elsewhere in the United States is a myth. Reviews of past elections show that instances of noncitizens voting in the state are exceedingly rare.
An analysis by Wisconsin Watch and information from the Wisconsin Election Commission reveals only four substantiated and prosecuted instances of noncitizen voting between 2012 and 2023 out of more than 31 million votes cast during that period. Most cases involved people who misunderstood their eligibility to vote.
Studies of voting in other states across the country have similarly found minuscule numbers of non-citizen votes. The Brennan Center for Justice studied voting in the 2016 presidential election across 42 jurisdictions. In those jurisdictions, 23.5 million votes were cast in the 2016 general election, and officials referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting to further investigation or prosecution. Thus, alleged improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001 percent of the votes cast in the 2016 election in those jurisdictions.
The Heritage Foundation, authors of “Project 2025,” maintains an election fraud database dating to 1979, logging prosecutions for election irregularities. A recent search of that dataset found only 85 cases nationwide involving allegations of noncitizen voting from 2002 to 2023 out of roughly 2 billion votes cast in federal elections during that time.
In 2022, Georgia conducted a comprehensive citizenship review of the state’s voter lists. It identified 1,634 people over 25 who had filled out forms to register to vote even though they were not U.S. citizens. However, none had been permitted to register to vote and, thus, had not cast ballots.
Federal law bans noncitizens from voting in federal elections, including races for president, vice president, Senate, or House of Representatives. Under a law adopted in 1996, noncitizens who vote can face a fine or a prison term as long as a year or both — not to mention deportation.
As the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights recently stated:
"Indeed, it defies logic that non-U.S. citizens would risk their immigration status, the potential of criminal prosecution, the future opportunity for naturalization, and freedom for themselves and their families by unlawfully committing an affirmative act to vote in an election in which they are prohibited from participating. The penalties for registering or voting as a non-U.S. citizen include imprisonment or deportation. The risks for any non-U.S. citizen to vote in a federal election are serious and steep, and our laws already effectively prevent significant unlawful voter registration and voting."
If non-citizen voting is both illegal and extremely rare, then why is it an issue now?
Although this is a nonissue based on myth, Republican elected officials in Wisconsin and elsewhere have been fanning the flames with claims of fraudulent non-citizen voting. Earlier this year, the U.S. House Republicans passed a bill forbidding non-citizens to vote in federal elections, even though it’s already against the law. Fact-checkers at PolitiFact declared that a statement by former president Donald Trump that millions of immigrants were being brought into the country to vote in elections illegally was a “Pants on Fire” lie.
Notwithstanding that there is no evidence of non-citizen voting in the state, conservative politicians in Wisconsin are claiming that more procedures are needed to prevent non-citizen voting, pointing to the fact that non-citizens who are legally present in Wisconsin are entitled to apply for and receive driver’s licenses.
A group involved in voter suppression filed a lawsuit in Waukesha County seeking to require the Wisconsin Election Commission to compare the lists of registered voters in the state against the records of the Division of Motor Vehicles of the Department of Transportation. This petition could remove thousands of recently naturalized US citizens from the election lists if successful.
Database matching may sound like a simple idea, but instead, it is likely to disenfranchise many eligible voters under the guise of addressing an imaginary non-citizen voting problem. Although the DMV has a record of citizenship status when the driver’s license or state ID is issued, the DMV has no way of knowing if someone recently became a citizen and is now eligible to vote. If the DMV lists are used, hundreds or thousands of Wisconsin’s newest citizens might be wrongly declared ineligible to vote in the election.
Some election officials across the country have attempted large-scale voter roll purges, but in many cases, the people removed were naturalized U.S. citizens who had to be reinstated. The Texas acting secretary of state resigned in 2019 after his office wrongly questioned the U.S. citizenship of nearly 100,000 people.
The proposed constitutional amendment is on November’s ballot.
This attempt to create the illusion that non-citizen voting is a problem is also behind the proposed constitutional amendment submitted to Wisconsin voters in November.
The current constitutional language on voting in Article III, section 1 of the Wisconsin Constitution says that “every” U.S. citizen 18 or older has a right to vote, thus guaranteeing inclusively that all citizens should be allowed to cast a ballot. The proposed amendment would amend section 1 to say that “only” a U.S. citizen 18 or older can vote in national, state and local elections, eliminating the language of a right for every citizen and making citizenship a minimum qualification for the ability to vote. In other words, the Constitution would now say that “only” citizens can vote without saying that “every” citizen can vote.
Many fear this proposed constitutional amendment could set the basis for a future proposal requiring proof of citizenship at the polls. A Brennan Center analysis states that such a measure at a national level, like the House-passed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), could disenfranchise more than 21 million U.S. citizens who don’t have readily available documents like a passport or birth certificate proving their citizenship.
Locating these documents or replacing lost ones creates another obstacle to voting for thousands of citizens. Challenges to the validity of documents presented could be used to frustrate would-be voters further. Since people don't carry these documents, they cannot take advantage of opportunities encountered at community sites where registration drives have been set up. College students residing away from home may have never applied for a passport and leave important documents like birth certificates at home with their parents rather than in their dorm rooms.
False claims of non-citizen voting are being used throughout the country to enact more onerous voter identification requirements, limitations on voter assistance in languages other than English, and attempts to spread misinformation about voting. These actions in Wisconsin and elsewhere seek to intimidate members of immigrant communities and communities of color from exercising their lawful right to vote.
